On the 15th birthday of the World Wide Web, a look back

15 years ago this month, the first HTML page was posted on the Internet. …

In November of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at Europe's CERN Particle Physics Laboratory, invented the very first web server and web browser. The server, entitled simply httpd, and the browser, called WorldWideWeb, ran on Tim's NeXT cube and worked exclusively on the NeXTstep operating system. Archive copies of Tim's first web page and some early web sites show a web that is simultaneously very different from the modern one and yet still very familiar.

In an article published to coincide with the Web's 15th anniversary, James Boyle, law professor and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, points out that the web developed in a unique fashion, due to conditions unlikely to be repeated today. The idea of hypertext was not invented by Berners-Lee. Vannevar Bush proposed a hypertext-like linking system as early as 1945. A working model was built by the team led by Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse, in 1968. Computer activist Ted Nelson proposed a much more advanced form of the World Wide Web, called Xanadu, in his seminal work Computer Lib. Even Apple created a non-networked version of hypertext called Hypercard in 1987.

The main difference with Berners-Lee's creation was that it was based on open standards, such as the TCP/IP networking protocol, and that anyone could create content for the World Wide Web with tools no more complex than a text editor. While most people remember the Web taking off with the initial release of a browser from the commercial company Netscape, the original WWW grew mainly out of academia, where source code was traded freely in the interest of promoting learning. The "View Source" feature, available in all browsers today, grew out of this environment.

What also isn't commonly remembered today is that major commercial interests were trying their best to promote proprietary, closed-off online networks that the Web eventually replaced. Many of these networks ran on mainframes and had stiff hourly access charges, like CompuServe and GEnie. A graphical version, Prodigy, was run by IBM and Sears, and enjoyed some success with a flat-rate access model. The most popular service was America On-Line, which still exists today, albeit as a shadow of its former self. The days where television programs would advertise their "AOL keyword" are rapidly vanishing; today, almost everyone simply gives a URL instead. Ultimately, the larger range of sites provided by the World Wide Web won out over the more restricted and content-controlled private services.

Boyle argues that with the massive public attention focused on the Web today, if a new network were to be built to replace it, it would almost certainly be encumbered with legal restrictions and control over who is allowed to create and distribute content. It would look nothing like the Web we enjoy today. One might be tempted to predict that such a network would fail just like the earlier services failed when faced with the WWW, but back then the legal system barely paid attention to the activities of a few academic geeks. These days, with everybody accessing the Web, things would be very different.

The open WWW itself is coming under increasing legal threats. The furor caused by phone companies over technology like Voice-over-IP has developed into proposed legal action, threatening the fundamental principle of Network Neutrality (the idea that the network does not care what bits you send over it) that caused the World Wide Web to surge in popularity in the first place. Will powerful corporate interests end up undoing every digital freedom that has been won? Or will the momentum of the WWW carry its open foundations into a new age?